


Amateur Auteur

by Mertiya



Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: And no angst for once, Bad Acting, Dates gone horribly wrong, Ember Island Players style, Fluff, It's only incredibly late that's all, M/M, Unset Uncharted Realms, amazing right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 03:33:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14179626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: Ral convinces Jace to go to a children's play with him, but he's rather cagey about telling Jace what the play is actually about.  They're both in for a nasty shock.





	Amateur Auteur

            “Okay, Ral, I’ll bite.” Jace Beleren, the Living Guildpact, shifted in his seat and adjusted his simple brown tunic. He hated going out without his cloak, but he also hated worrying that he would drop his illusions when he was distracted. “Why are we at a childrens’ school play in the Eighth District?”

            Ral Zarek, the Living Guildpact’s lover, turned a wide smile on him, with just a little bit of a crook in one corner of his lip. Some people might not have noticed it. Jace knew it meant trouble. “Because I need to be supportive of my cousin’s offspring, Jace, _honestly_. Why else?”

            “Probably for the same reason you wouldn’t tell me what the play was about beforehand,” Jace muttered darkly, sinking slightly into his seat. The lights were dimming now, anyway, so he needed to quiet down.

            Ral reached over and squeezed his hand, and, ugh, that was it, this was going to be terrible, because Ral rarely if ever remembered physical affection without prompting. If he _did_ , that probably meant he was excited because he was about to do something terribly, terribly annoying. Or Jace had nearly died. One of the two.

            The first thing Jace saw after the curtain came up was a child of about twelve years old standing in the center of the stage, wearing a very long, very blue cloak, with his hair forming a spike that probably could have been used by a particular murderous member of the Rakdos as a decidedly lethal weapon. “Oh dear,” he said, in a tone of voice that suggested he was concentrating very hard on not forgetting his lines, “Who could have robbed me of my memories? Who would do such a thing?”

            _Mother of storms_. Jace groaned and put his face in his hands. “Really?” he asked Ral. “Really? Was this really necessary?”

            “ _Shhhh_ ,” someone hissed from the row behind him.

            “Yeah, Berrim,” Ral whispered cheerfully. “ _Shhhh_.”

            “I hate you so much right now,” Jace hissed back.

            Onstage, his fictional counterpart was talking to himself about how dire the situation on Ravnica was with the guilds “fractured and failing,” which he stammered over. Jace studied the cloak the child was wearing. It had—rather a lot of white lines sewn onto it, with no particular rhyme or reason behind them. Several were already starting to fray off, and Jace sternly squashed the sudden, absurd impulse to go fix them.

            The lights flickered, and for one hopeful moment, Jace thought they were failing, and then he realized, with a deep sigh, that it was just part of the show.

            “Beleren!” someone snarled, and—that. That was actually a pretty passable imitation of Ral’s voice? A moment later, Ral tensed beside him as another child stalked onstage. Jace snorted with sudden, slightly wild laughter, because this was the cousin’s kid, he was almost sure. He’d met Seb once or twice at Ral’s parents’ house, and he had the same dark hair and similar bone structure to Ral. Usually, he wore plain green clothing or something white and green with vague Selesnyan implications. Right now, he was decked out in full Izzet red-and-blue, complete with what looked like a cardboard version of Ral’s gauntlet. The top of his hair had been streaked with white. “Give me your thoughts,” Seb demanded.

            “What the _fuck_ ,” the real Ral said, and Jace found himself convulsing with laughter.

            “I think—” he tried, but now Seb and the child version of himself were facing off with one another, and—oh god—someone had started a music enchantment, and—were they going to start _singing_? Jace couldn’t tell if he was about to die of embarrassment or of being unable to breathe from laughing. “I think—” he managed. “Think they’ve conflated your role with Mirko’s.”

            “ _Shhhhhh_ ,” someone said again, rather violently, and Jace tried, with limited success, to mitigate his laughter.

            “Why is Seb playing _me_?” Ral demanded in a low growl.

            “Well, he does look like you,” Jace pointed out reasonably.

            “No! I mean! Why am I in this?” Ral’s hands were clutching at the sides of his chairs and he was, as Jace discovered when he looked over, white as a sheet, although it was unclear if the reaction was induced by anger or fear. A tentative mind-poke returned both results.

            “Well, Ral,” Jace said in amusement. “Is this a musical about the Implicit Maze?”

            “That _you_ solved,” Ral said hotly, “Supposedly, at least.”

            “I seem to remember a certain member of the Izzet standing up dramatically in front of everyone and announcing to the entire crowd of people ‘I AM RAL ZAREK AND I, NO ONE ELSE, WILL BE RUNNING THE MAZE FOR THE IZZET’,” Jace pointed out, still trying not to laugh.

            “What are you doing?” Jace’s stage counterpart demanded loudly, as Seb fumbled with the cardboard gauntlet.

            “I’m attacking you with my thermogenic magic! Blessed be the Lady Baal!”

            “Oh for _fuck’s sake_ ,” Ral snarled, and immediately got shushed again. He lowered his voice slightly to speak into Jace’s ear. “You know what? I changed my mind. I should never have put you through this. Let’s leave.”

            “Aha! You’ll never catch me, because of my magic teleporter!” shouted on-stage Jace. “And you won’t catch me in the Maze either, because I’m much better at puzzles than you are!”

            “Yeah,” Jace murmured, with a grin. “I’m _much_ better at puzzles than you are, Ral.”

            “You _bastard_.”

            “Hey, this wasn’t _my_ idea.”

            “Okay, I regret it, let’s leave.”

            “After we came all this way? And what about supporting your cousin’s child’s thespian aspirations?”

            “I _changed my mind_.”

            “So did I.” Jace settled back in his seat. “I think I’m going to enjoy this.”

            The teleporter figured heavily, especially when Ral sent a crew of evil vampires to kill Jace, and then later, when Jace outwitted Ruric Thar by doing—something. Jace wasn’t actually sure what was happening on stage, but the kids seemed to be having a lot of fun singing and hitting each other with wooden swords.

            At this point, Ral was keeping up a steady stream of muttered, irritable criticism, interspersed with the occasional, “Oh COME ON!” followed by intense shushing. Jace was a little impressed they hadn’t been bodily thrown out at this point, but decided against saying anything on the grounds that Ral would probably take that as a challenge.

            “Give me back my memories!” fake Jace was now proclaiming to three children in what the real Jace had to admit was actually quite an impressive mixture of papier-maché and illusion magic, although the real Niv Mizzet was rather more intimidating.

            “Oh, little mind mage,” chorused Niv Mizzet, which wasn’t actually a terrible line but somewhat difficult to follow because his head, midsection, and tail were all trying to say it at once and seemed to be out of sync with each other, “haven’t you figured it out yet? I haven’t touched your memories. That was all your own doing.”

            Everyone on stage gasped in audible, highly exaggerated surprise. Jace groaned and put his face in his hands. At his side, Ral cheered up enough to jab him in the ribs with an elbow. “Remind me again why you thought that was a good idea?”

            “Because I was panicking? And I don’t think very clearly when I panic?”

            “I…erased my _own_ memories?” A spotlight sputtered in to focus on stage Jace. “Why would I…” He put a hand to his forehead. “I remember now! It’s all coming back!”

            “Krokt, I _wish_ ,” real Jace muttered glumly under his breath.

            “Now I know what the Maze really means! It’s not a competition at all!”

            “I…think that’s the first vaguely accurate line in this whole thing?” Jace muttered sideways to Ral, while on stage, he exclaimed, “I have to go find Emmara and let her know!”

            Emmara turned out to be an elf child on stilts covered in felt. “Emmara!” onstage Jace exclaimed, “I need your help!” He threw out an arm, causing his cloak to billow dramatically behind him in a way that was a little bit too on-point for Jace’s taste.

            Ral thought so, too, judging from the elbow to Jace’s ribs and the muttered, “At least _that’s_ accurate.”

            “Go away, Jace, there is no help for you here,” little Emmara said in what sounded like all one breath.

            “But I love you!” small Jace exclaimed, and the real Jace buried his face in his hands and groaned. Beside him, Ral shifted rather awkwardly.

            “Uh,” he said. “So. Still, uh, sorry about that, uh, whole. Thing.”

            “ _Please shut up_ ,” Jace moaned, although he wasn’t sure if he was talking to Ral or to the two onstage, who were continuing with a relentlessly poorly acted rendition of a pleading Jace discovering that Emmara was being mind-controlled by—Ral. Of course. Jace was rapidly starting to wonder if he should take Ral up on the offer to leave after all, but at this point, it would be difficult enough to reach the exit, given the number of people they would have to trip over, and Jace refused to planeswalk for something this trivial. He had _some_ pride.

            Oh, they were singing again. Wonderful. This time it was a duet, and stage-Jace was pouring out all kinds of extremely embarrassing lines about true love. Jace didn’t think he’d ever wanted to hit a child more. Once the song was finally over, and stage-Jace had performed some fancy pyrotechnics, small Emmara snapped out of the spell and agreed to help him run the Maze. At least there was no kiss. Jace thought he might have actually died.

            The lights went down, and for one wonderful moment, Jace thought there was going to be an intermission. It would be wonderfully simple to slip out during an intermission and, if necessary, make some excuse to Ral’s family later. Then he heard a set of thudding, tramping noises, a number of whispers and giggles, and the noise of furniture being moved. This went on for several minutes before the lights came back up.

            Clearly, there were a lot of children who needed roles in the play, and just as clearly they had all been given them. Jace was vaguely surprised there was enough room on the stage; there had to be at least fifty people up there, all of them wearing various different home-made guild outfits. Judging from the abundance of different interpretations of what each guild wore, it seemed rather likely that the costumes had been provided by childrens’ parents, rather than by any more centralized authority.

            Seb stomped onto stage again on one side, and the little Jace and little Emmara entered from the other side. “I won’t let you take away my glory!” Seb shouted, and Ral winced and put his head in his hands. Jace wisely didn’t say that that actually sounded like a reasonable facsimile of what had happened on the day of the Maze.

            “What are you doing, Guildmage Zarek?” asked another one of the children. “You aren’t even the Izzet Maze-runner.”

            Jace winced as Ral’s nails dug into his bicep. “Ouch?” he whispered plaintively to Ral, who grunted in response.

            “Of course I am,” Seb answered. “I’m the only one who’s qualified, after all.”

            “ _True_ ,” Ral muttered angrily.

            “ _Shhhhh_!” said one of the exasperated mothers from behind them. For a moment, Jace actually thought Ral was going to turn around and start yelling, but he didn’t. Lightning did, however, fork across from his left shoulder to his right, and Jace yelped as some of it grounded itself in his arm.

            “ _Ral_ ,” he hissed.

            “Sorry,” Ral grunted.

            “That’s not true,” said one of the other actors softly, stepping forward. This child was wearing blue and red as well and also a liberal amount of blue face paint. “The guildmaster himself created me for this purpose. No one else could be better than me, Melek.”

            Jace prudently ducked, which turned out to be a good idea, because if he hadn’t, Ral’s flying elbow would have connected with his face. “Oh, COME ON!” Electricity sizzled to the ground between them. “It wasn’t sapient! You’ve got to be _kidding_ me!”

            “I will heal your heart,” onstage Melek said. “So that you will remember the true meaning of being Izzet is to serve our great parun wholeheartedly.”

            “That is fucking _bullshit_!” Ral was seething, and Jace couldn’t help but sympathize on this point. Loyalty was not exactly one of the virtues espoused by the guild; he couldn’t count the number of times he’d walked in to hear one or other of the mages complaining that “the old bat” was going to cut their funding if they didn’t magically get results.

            Still, he couldn’t help snorting with laughter as the weird on the stage performed a complicated contortion, producing a spark of red illusion magic that passed through Seb’s chest. The expression Seb responded with was probably intended to be surprise, but looked more like a mix of constipation and having forgotten his lines.

            “I, um,” he stalled for a long minute, and someone from the wings hissed very loudly, “I’m _healed_.”

            “Oh right,” Seb said, then waved his gauntlet in the air and proclaimed, “I’m healed! My dark heart has been turned to good, and from now on I won’t try to take over Ravnica anymore.”

            “Do you need us to leave?” Jace murmured sideways, as he suddenly considered the possibilities of Ral going vaguely nuclear in a crowded theater. His lover irritably adjusted the dial of his gauntlet.

            “No, no,” he said after a long moment, letting out an indrawn breath. “We’ll just end up tripping over everyone. It’s just a dumb kids’ play. Besides, I don’t give a fuck what people think about me.”

            Well, that was a lie. Jace laced his fingers in between Ral’s. “Just remember, you _solved_ the damn thing when no one else could,” he breathed in Ral’s ear. “Also, more people know who I am, and look what they’re doing to me.”

            He felt the slightly cheered smirk Ral sent him. _I guess if you can put up with this travesty, I can, too_.

            On stage, Seb and Melek were frolicking together in a way that should have been in step but mostly involved Melek stepping on Seb’s feet, which was marginally more accurate anyway. After a few minutes, they gave up and started “running the Maze.” There had probably been supposed to be some sort of choreography involved, but most of the children appeared to have gotten a little bit overexcited.

            Someone was whispering loudly at the side of the stage, and the whispering devolved rather quickly into loud statements. “No!” Jace heard someone saying from off-stage. “You’re supposed to be over _there_! No, you’re going the wrong way! Get back on the stage!”

            “Where are you going?” someone else called.

            “Hey!”

            “That was my eye!”

            “That was my _foot_!”

            “ _Get back on the stage_!”

            Stage Jace stumbled back on just as Seb came in from the other side, both of them running at top speed. In the audience, Jace winced, but before they could collide, the Jace on stage executed a rapid turn to the left. Unfortunately, he couldn’t seem to stop his momentum entirely and he slammed into the scenery in the back with an audible crack and a pained yelp. The scenery swayed ominously, and stage Jace just had time to look up in concern before it was grandly swooping over backwards with a spectacularly thunderous crash. There was a horrified pause, and then the curtain came down.

~

            “Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” Jace teased Ral as the two of them headed for the exit. Thankfully, the destruction of the entire backdrop had been enough to bring the play to a screeching halt before Ral got upset enough for a sizable portion of the audience to end up electrocuted.

            “Baal, have I ever,” groaned Ral. “That was wrong on so many levels.”

            “Oh, I don’t know,” said someone else. “Young Seb does rather a good impression of you, don’t you think, Ral?”

            Ral blanched, and Jace looked curiously to the side. The woman also exiting had silver hair streaked with black, and her crooked aquiline profile was very familiar. She walked with an iron cane, but still managed to stand up perfectly straight.

            “What are _you_ doing here?” Ral demanded, and the woman chuckled.

            “Is that any way to talk to your grandmother?”

            “It damn well is, yes.”

            “I came to watch the play,” Ral’s grandmother said with a smile. “And it is possible that I may have remembered you saying you were going to bring your partner to it.”

            “Um,” said Jace.

            “Oh, excuse me.” She held out a hand. “Marzanna Zarek. I’m very pleased to meet you, Jace.”

            “Pleased to meet you t—” Jace got halfway through before realizing that she hadn’t addressed him as “Berrim” and turned angrily to Ral. “I thought we agreed not to tell anyone who I was?”

            “I wasn’t born yesterday, boy,” Marzanna told him. “And Ral isn’t as circumspect as he thinks he is. Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me. Besides, no one is going to expect to see you out and about and dressed like an actual human being.”

            Jace felt his cheeks and ears heating up. “Well, I’m glad to meet you, ma’am,” he managed, finally. “Um. Ral’s told me a lot about you.”

            “Not all bad, I hope?” She smiled.  "Oh, I do want to apologize.  That play did have an actual ending, but, well, it looks as if the children got over-excited."

            Ral and Jace exchanged a look.  "It was pretty accurate," Jace said, with an almost shame-faced grin. 

            "Probably the most accurate part of the production," Ral sighed.

           "Well, you did try to kill me."

           "Only a little!" Ral protested, turning away slightly.

           Marzanna laughed again.  "Well, either way, let me take you two out to dinner.”

            “Grandmother!” Ral groaned. “I have had a _traumatic_ evening.”

            “And whose fault is that?” Jace muttered.

            Marzanna patted Ral’s shoulder. “There, there. That’s what you get for making guildmage.”

            Ral gave a theatrical sigh, but Jace knew that sigh, so he wasn’t particularly surprised when his lover said in a longsuffering tone. “All _right_. But only if Jace agrees. He has also had a traumatic evening.” He draped an arm around Jace.

            “Also your fault,” Jace muttered sideways, and got a pinprick shock to his ear in response. He smacked Ral’s hand. “ _I_ would be very happy to go out to dinner with you, Marzanna, with or without Ral.”

            “Wonderful,” Marzanna said with a smile. “Do you like _pirozhki_?”

            “I do, yes,” Jace agreed.

            “You’re paying, right?” Ral drawled, and Marzanna shook her cane at him.

            “Ungrateful child,” she said. “Yes, I can pay.”

            “I mean, I could—” Jace started, and Ral shook his head.

            “She likes to feel useful,” he said, and got a rap on his head from the cane. “Ow!”

            “You are the worst boy I ever had a hand in raising,” Marzanna told him, but she was still smiling. “All right, come along, you two. I have several things I need to ask Jace’s opinion on.”

            Bemused, Jace followed her and Ral as they started up a cheerful verbal sparring match. All things considered, it had been a rather peculiar evening. But maybe not as bad as he’d feared in the beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> Marzanna Zarek is Rastaban's invention (see her fantastic Ral backstory Spark). Many thanks to her for brainstorming this with me and letting me borrow Marzanna.


End file.
